Dark
by j-orbanski
Summary: John can't sleep in the dark. It's triggered his PTSD ever since he got back from Afghanistan. But happens when a storm knocks out the power and there isn't any light left?  Sherlock / John; hurt-comfort


**074.) Dark **

**Author:** Jordan  
**Fandom:** Sherlock BBC  
**Pairing:** Sherlock / John  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Word Count:** 1,209  
**Warnings:** Has to do with PTSD and its effects.  
**Disclaimer:** Only borrowing the characters, nor profit, etc.  
**Summary:** John can't sleep in the dark. It's triggered his PTSD ever since he got back from Afghanistan. But happens when a storm knocks out the power and there isn't any light left?  
**Notes:** Written for my 100 prompts in 200 days

* * *

John Watson sleeps with a night light. He's realised that this makes him seem slightly infantile, but he doesn't care, since it has helped him sleep since he got back from Afghanistan.

The small ball of light by his bedside has helped with his nightmares. Sleeping in pitch-black reminds him of attempting to sleep through gunshots and bloodshed. There were nights when he woke up and swore he could still feel warm blood flowing through his hands, another life seeping through his fingers and into the sand, swallowing life like a drowning man swallowing water.

The only thing that helps is some sort of light when sleeping. Sometimes he falls asleep with the telly on, and sometimes that helps his dreams, dreaming about discounted Hoovers of 4am infomercials, but then there's times when there's a knife commercial and all he can dream of is blood.

He reckons that Sherlock knows about how he needs some light to sleep, and maybe Sherlock thinks he's stupid for it, but he doesn't care what Sherlock thinks.

But then comes the storm.

It's been raining torrents of water for hours and the thunder and lightning has streaked the charcoal-violet sky for the past twenty minutes, and there's no sign of it letting up.

John sits in his chair, mug of tea in his hands, focusing on the telly which is on the Food Network for no particular reason, other than he doesn't have to think much about what's going on. His feet are curled underneath him as he tries to remain as comfortable as possible with rain splattering the windows, the sky becoming perpetually darker by the second.

Sherlock lies on the sofa, his toes curling and uncurling as he speed reads through some book about the world's most complicated unsolved mysteries, scoffs of laughter coming from him every so often. This makes John smile as he watches as Nigella wakes in the middle of the night for another craving of chocolate bread pudding in her double-doored fridge.

That's when the lightning cracks through the air like a whip again and the lights flicker once, twice, and then go out completely. They hear the wind down of everything around them shutting down.

Sherlock is more worried about the limbs in the freezer and the pig's head in the refrigerator rotting than anything else.

John is already craving some type of light as he begins to hear the gunshots in the distance, although he knows somewhere deep down, it's all a figment of his imagination.

It takes a minute for his eyes to adjust before he begins to scramble around the flat, trying to find a working torch, extra batteries, candles, a lighter, anything that will give him some sort of light.

He's pissed at himself that he made Sherlock uninstall the Bunsen burner from the kitchen table, because right now that would be most helpful. He's sure that Sherlock could put a few chemicals together in a flask and then burn them into bright colors, illuminating the kitchen and his mind.

He carefully goes downstairs to Mrs. Hudson's, who screams about looters until she realises it's him. Her flat is kept bright by the giant candlesticks on the mantle, but when he asks if she has any extra candles, she says that she gave the rest away to Mrs. Turner and her boys as Christmas gifts.

Sighing, he makes his way upstairs once again where he finds Sherlock in front of their never-used fireplace, ripping up the rest of Van Coon and Lukis's books, then attempting to light the pages. It keeps alight for a couple of minutes, but then turns to charred embers – there isn't enough fuel to keep it lit for long, and they don't have any firewood.

"You can't be in pitch-black dark for long, it activates your PTSD. It's the worst when you're sleeping in the dark, but just being in the dark for too long can trigger it as well. It's already started, hasn't it, John?" Sherlock asks, although he doesn't need to, because he can already observe that it has.

"I'm not even going to ask you how you figured that out, because you already know that I think you're brilliant."

Sherlock walks into the kitchen and attempts to hook up the gas hoses to connect to the Bunsen burner, but John stops him – they don't need an actual gas explosion on Baker Street from Sherlock fiddling in the dark.

John ends up finding a half-dead torch under the sink behind jars of pond scum. It gives him some sort of relief to have a ball of light in his hands, other than the flashes of lightning scarcely lighting up the sky in unknown intervals. After an hour even the lightning stops, but after a quick phone call to the power company, they find they'll be in the dark until morning.

This isn't any comfort to John as he holds the now-flickering torch in his hands as Sherlock scavenges through the flat, trying to create more light. It's one of the most caring things Sherlock has done for John, and while he's appreciative, he wonders why the usually uncaring detective is now trying to be so helpful.

By midnight, John's eyelids are drooping and the torch has been dead for almost an hour. Sherlock searched the house for the right type of batteries once again, but found none, not even Mrs. Hudson had them. John has had to stop him three different times from chopping up a piece of furniture to throw in the fireplace.

"Other than light, what makes it go away?" Sherlock asks, three patches on his arm, trying to figure out a way to normalize John once again.

"Human contact. One night when I slept over Sarah's, when we were still together, we spooned. I didn't dream at all. I woke up more refreshed than I'd been since before I'd been deployed."

John hears men shouting for a medic and swears he can feel the sting of sand in his eyes, blinding him for seconds at a time, blood boiling through his veins as his brain melts within his skull.

His shoulder feels white-hot pain when Sherlock grabs him to stand up. Their fingers interlock as John murmurs, "Sherlock, why are you bleeding? Did one of the bullets graze you when Miller was shot? I tried to save him, but there was so much blood. I couldn't do it. I tried my best, but there was so much blood. I kept stitching and he kept bleeding."

Sherlock leads him carefully up the stairs to John's bedroom and tells him to lie down on the bed. John almost refuses, knowing that sleep and demons and war is coming if he falls asleep. But the demons have already invaded John's mind; he can feel the bullets flying past him, his hearing muffled from the close-range fire.

John lies down on his side, curling into a ball, his arms folded across his chest, his figure almost shaking with fear. Sherlock undoes the duvet and covers John before he sidles in next to him, wrapping his arms around the frightened man.

John closes his eyes, the gunshots fading, the blood evaporating. He dreams a dreamless sleep that night.


End file.
